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"East
-- West" constitutes one of the most important concepts for Russian
culture in its search for self-knowledge. Serving as a point of departure, this
opposition bears within itself metaphysical and geographic, mythic, religious, geopolitical,
historical and social aims. A conventional semantic construct, "East and
West" is the historical product of the culturological thinking of mankind.
It represents a primordial (cosmogonic) typology of world culture and functions
as a paired category expressing the dichotomy of the polarized whole of world
culture. It characterizes simultaneously both the ambivalent, symbolic unity of
human culture (evolving precisely within the framework of East and West) and
its division into models of cultural identity fundamentally distinct, and, in
many ways, antithetical to each other. Presupposing yet at the same time
excluding each other, these models embody both the complementary and
contradictory nature of principles that serve as polarities, i.e. the dialectic
of unity and plurality of world culture as a complex, self-evolving Whole. If a
given cultural text expresses in some aspect or another one of these two
polarities, then its opposite always shows up in the epistemological context of
this cultural text in order to compensate for the incompleteness and
one-sidedness of the first polarity. Constituting an extremely broad system of
semantic formation built on spatial coordinates and serving any concrete
national culture, "East -- West" represents, in the
interrelationships of its content, a simple and universal case of cultural topology in general (two distinct topoi, forming a pair possessing
semantic intensity and, at the same time, an organic semantic association).
As a
rule, the juxtaposition of North and South replaced the antinomy of East and
West whenever the dichotomy of East and West seemed insufficient or
inapplicable. Thus, for Russian culture of the XVIII to XIX centuries, the
North as personified by North Palmyra/St. Petersburg constituted a Russian
variant of West European civilization confronting the "wild" South
(the untamed mountains of the Caucasus, "the plains of the Kirghiz-Kaisak
[nationality]”, exotic Central Asia, dangerous neighbors, that is, Turkey and
Persia, remote and mysterious China, isolated from the world by the Great
Wall).
In
contrast to the "North -- South" dichotomy, the semantic pair "East
-- West" represents a clearly defined dilemma with implications for
society, culture and civilization: either/or.
The
juxtaposition of the cultures of East and West (especially impressive in the
light of the research carried out by M. Weber into Western and Eastern
religions) has revealed a nearly infinite series of semantic antinomies between
them: democracy (freedom, equality) -- despotism; asceticism -- mysticism;
scientific knowledge, rationalism -- intuition, custom; dynamism, development
-- immobility, stability; modernization, innovation -- traditionalism,
ritualism; individualism, the human personality -- collectivism, the state; Logos -- Dao; an active
technical-technological transformation of the world -- the attainment of
harmony with nature and one's environment; a market economy, bourgeois society
-- a classless society, communism. The cultural-philosophical typologies of
East and West in the XX century are highly diverse (compare the positions of Karl
Jaspers, Carl Jung, V. Shubart, N. Conrad), but, in one way or another, they
include a dichotomy of opposites, whether the opposition is softened or
highlighted.
East
and West, representing distinct paradigms of society, culture and civilization,
have coexisted for centuries and even millennia, battling each other,
interacting with each other and -- openly or indirectly -- influencing each
other. Yet, in the process of confronting each other in history (a process that
has constantly changed its forms and the semantic interrelationship of the
above paradigms), East and West nonetheless were never able to overcome their
semantic and structural parallelism, i.e., their mutual non-interchangeability,
their symbolic (political, philosophical, religious, artistic, and so on)
antinomy. However far apart the cultural, semantic systems of East and West may
be, they remain linked to each other -- at the very least by the sum total of
distinct principles or set of criteria and principles, by which they may be
compared to each other (including also as antithetical pairs). However closely
East and West draw near to each other, mutually exclusive norms and values,
capable of polarizing their semantic fields to an extreme degree, will always
be found. Even when applied to a single, culturally unitary object of
observation or scientific study, one may still speak of the ambivalence of
Eastern and Western principles represented by it.